Ghost Consultant
Chapter 13: Fun in Hi Skule?
(?)
"Time's not moving," Dipper said. It had been what felt like hours, and they had trudged the unpaved road until they had to stop and rest. He checked his phone again. No bars—he didn't expect any—and the clock was stuck exactly where it was the first time he had checked: 9:13.
"There's no way out, is there?" Eloise asked as they found a fallen tree and sat on the trunk.
"There's always a way out," he said, trying to put into his voice a confidence he didn't feel.
"Where do you think we are?" she asked. She leaned into him. "Would you—would you just hold my hand? I know you're engaged and all, but—it's dark and I'm scared."
He took her hand. "Where are we? I don't know. I guess in a way we're in the high school hallway—but not completely. We're in a warp of some kind. I don't think it's a whole other dimension, but—it's a place that's shut off from normality, one that messes with our heads."
"It's too big to be the hall," Eloise said. "We must have walked for four or five miles."
"It seems like that," Dipper said. "But—well, we may have been shrunk, for example. We may be tiny, an inch tall, and still in the hallway and just, I don't know, hallucinating this road and this forest."
"You can do anything with me you want, Dipper," Eloise whispered to him in a husky, seductive tone.
"If I only—wait, what?"
"I need a boy," she said. Then she startled and gasped, "Did I—did I just say that out loud?"
"Eloise, we can't—" Yow! Dipper's voice had cracked the way it had when he was thirteen, but much worse. He sounded like an adenoidal idiot!
"Why did you dump me for Cinthia, you bastard?" Crack! Eloise slapped him so hard the world flashed yellow for a moment.
"It's me! I'm Dipper!" he said, his voice still skating up and down as it cracked.
He jumped up, pulling her to her feet. "Come on! We have to move!"
They almost ran for the first hundred steps. Then Eloise said, "Oh, my God, I thought for a minute you were Jason—and I didn't mean that! And before, well–OK, I've sort of daydreamed about you before, but really I wasn't offering, you know—"
"It's this place," he said, and his voice, thank God, was back to normal. "It's screwing with us. I think it's—it's trying to find our weak spots, our insecurities."
"Then we're doomed!" she said, sounding as if it were intended as a joke—but if so, it misfired.
"Look!" Dipper said, pointing ahead. "Sun's coming up!"
The sun was rising—but the swollen yellow half-moon still loomed in the sky, halfway to the zenith and directly above the brilliant disk of the sun, the illuminated half of the moon impossibly on the side away from the sun.
Like something in a bad dream, fog congealed instantly. The sun became a baleful red glow, the moon merely a smear. The trees on either side of the unpaved road paled and faded until they looked insubstantial, ghostly, a dim phantom forest of twisted, gnarled trees. Eloise cried out in alarm or fright. "Look at me!"
She was dressed in—rags. An extra-large dirty, torn man's shirt that hung to her knees, once white, now yellowed and threadbare. She was barefoot, her legs splotched and splattered with nasty brown mud, and her hair hung straggly and tangled. Tears streaked her muddy face. "I can't go to school like this!"
"Better than my get-up," he said. He wore black brief underwear and nothing else.
Her eyes widened as she realized that. "Oh, my God! Let's go back."
Dipper agreed. They turned and headed back along the road, but . . . there ahead of them floated the angry red disk of the sun and the blurred, bleared moon. No matter which way they turned, they were heading . . . east? Toward the rising sun, anyway. Dipper stopped Eloise. "Wait, wait," he said.
He closed his eyes and felt his chest.
Suit. No doubt about it. And his tie. He opened his eyes and saw his bare chest–now hairy as Grunkle Stan's, ape-hairy, though in truth he had a normal late-teen boy's growth. However, his fingers still felt the suit.
"OK," he said. "Calm down, Eloise. This is a hallucination, that's all. Check your jeans pockets. Close your eyes and put your hand in your pocket."
To him it looked as if she were patting the shirt tail, but then she said, "I feel it. This is crazy."
"It's this place messing with our minds, like I said." Dipper concentrated, telling himself I'm going to see things as they really are, I'm not going to be fooled.
Starting like an inkblot spreading over his body, his black suit came back, and Eloise's dusky-rose pink sweater and jeans. "Listen and try this," he said, and he talked her through the process. It took her longer, but finally she said, "I see my sneakers now. And there are my jeans legs. And you're no longer nearly naked. Darn it." She giggled.
"That's a good sign," he said in encouragement. "That you can joke. I–hey, I can barely see the floor tile right around our feet!"
"Can't make that out. Listen! What's that?"
Dipper heard it, the sound of a laboring, straining engine. Without knowing how he knew it, he said, "School bus!"
He dragged Eloise to the edge of the road–and their clothes began to change again when he didn't concentrate. Now Eloise was only in bra and panties.
The yellow-and-black bus looked like something from an ancient animated cartoon, something hallucinatory in a pre-Code Betty Boop epic from the Fleischer Brothers. It was a school bus–but one that had a stern face, the windshield two glaring eyes, the grill a mouth full of sharp teeth. And it was rubbery, elastic, bulging and stretching, its tires like smooth balloons with the cross marks of bandages on them.
It squealed to a stop and the grille opened to bawl, "ALLLLLL ABOARRRD!" in a gravelly voice like Popeye the Sailor's. The door opened, and–an enormous tongue the color of liver licked out, scooped up both Eloise and Dipper, and yanked them inside. The bus stood on its rear wheels, its front fenders becoming arms, and it rubbed its oil-pan belly, licking its chops and muttering, "Yum, yum!"
That was bad enough. The inside was a thousand times worse.
A startled Mr. Kamfer looked up from his tally of the last two weeks' absence reports, and he half-rose from his chair. "What–who–how–?"
The dark, beautiful young woman in the black pantsuit held up a badge wallet. "Agent Hazard, sir. I'm Agent Pines's backup. I just received a distress call. Where is he?"
Kamfer couldn't find his tongue: "Ahew, um, ah, he, he–who are you?"
She snapped the information at him again. "Field Agent Hazard! This is my badge! Agent Pines and young Eloise Niedermeyer are somewhere in this school! Where?"
Finally he got it got it together enough to say, "I, I, I–he didn't mention a partner–"
"It's Agency policy not to," she said. "If you can't help me, I'm going into the school to find them on my own." Though she didn't add the words, Kamfer would later think back on her tone under the impression that she had finished with, "and then it's just too damn bad for you!"
He could think of only one way to locate them. "Uh, um, the monitors–they–come with me."
He led her to an inner office–at one time the workroom, with the copier and the fax machine, and so on–and now half of it had become a surveillance center, where a dozen different monitors on shelves gave live-streamed images of everything from the athletic field to the hallways.
"This is A hall," he said, pointing to the first monitor on the left in the top row. "I mean, not, not, not just a hall, but the hall designated as A, the main classroom wing of–something's wrong."
"I'd say so," Hazard told him grimly. "Unless you normally have a tornado in the hallway."
That was what it looked like–one of those Weather Channel twisters, the low, broad kind, nearly spherical, a twisting mass of dark cloud and smoke. It stood toward the end of the hall–as it spun, you could occasionally glimpse a cross hall beyond it–and bulged, heaved, and whirled.
"Is there sound on this thing?" she asked.
Kamfer turned a knob. The speakers buzzed and crackled with static, but there was no freight-train roar of the kind you get with proper tornadoes. She held up her phone as though she were taking a video and asked, "Are you getting this, S?"
"Getting what?" Kamfer asked in a why-me whine.
"Not you!" snapped Hazard. "Chief? Can you see this?"
A baritone voice from the phone or device or whatever it was said, "I see it. Is it cutting Mason's off line of communication, or–"
"I don't know what the hell it's doing. Sir." After a beat, Agent Hazard added, "I'm going to try to get eyes on it. You–" she turned to Kamfer–"this building is currently a Priority One investigations scene. Don't move from your office. Take this seriously, because you could be hurt or worse if you ignore me. I'm going to go down that hall a short distance to see what this looks like to the naked eye."
"Naked, yes," Kamfer said in a daze.
"If anything blows up or happens to me, you get the hell away from this building and don't try to come back in! Understand?"
"Naked," he said, nodding.
She gave up on him, trotted back into the office and out into the hall, followed it until it made a thirty-degree turn to the right, and then walked down it toward darkness.
Because that's what it looked like from here–a long, long hall, the fluorescents overhead sputtering, until down at the far end a rotating irregular ball of blackness, of nothingness, spun.
"Are you still with me, Chief?" Hazard asked.
"Still following. My word, this is like a negative Portal! Is that electrical discharge? It's hard to see on the small screen."
"I see static discharges, yes," Hazard said. "Like scale-model lightning bolts. They're connecting with the lockers, but the brightest ones are up-and-down. I'm guessing they're tapping the electric lines–whoa!"
About a third of the fluorescent tubes popped, with bright blue-white flares of light–and the shards of thin glass rained down all around her. "It's blowing the lights!" she barked. They all went out at once.
"It didn't anticipate someone coming to check on it," Stanford Pines said.
The emergency lights came on in the halls, the powerful incandescents, battery-powered so they wouldn't last too long, but bright enough to cut through the smoke of a fire. The fire alarm began to shriek, too.
"Fire department will be all over this place in a minute," Hazard said. "Can you–?"
"I'm on it. Chestnut County, right?"
"Roger that. County seat is Miskwi."
"I'll order a condition red. Let's see . . . the National Guard unit commander is in the loop and will back up an order not to engage. That'll hold the public-safety units off for a while. See if you can get closer–but pull back if you have the least trouble."
"I'll get your nephew out if I can," Hazard said.
"No, before trying anything, first take care of yourself. I've got the utmost faith in Dipper."
Huh, Hazard thought. So his uncle knows his nom de guerre.
She stalked down the hallway toward the spinning ball of chaotic nothingness.
"OK," she said, grinning as she drew a compact quantum destabilizer. "Show me what you got."
Inside, the school bus was more nearly normal–well, not at all nearly normal, but at least still better than the squash-and-stretch outside had been. Rows of seats lay before Dipper and Eloise, and the bus stretched impossibly long–it had room for hundreds of students, maybe thousands.
Every seat was occupied by cold-faced or angry-faced teens, glaring and nearly snarling as a stumbling Dipper and Eloise tried to find their way back to a seat, any seat, where they wouldn't tumble flat on their faces each time the bus jolted. The grumbling, hate-filled voices followed them, striking them like blows from a whip:
"Skank!"
"Dipshit!"
"Ugly A.F!"
"Choo lookin' at, jerkface?"
Worst of all, Wendy had said of high school, everybody hates you!
"Don't listen to this," Dipper said to Eloise.
Instantly the rows of sneering kids began to mock him: "Don't wissen!"
He took a deep breath. Don't let it get to you. This isn't real. THEY aren't real. This is just–the worst of the messed-up stuff that happens in high school, boiled down to pure mean.
Before they found a single empty seat, the bus vanished around them, and there they stood in front of a warped and distorted high school. Mist all around. The red sun baleful, the yellow blurred moon like a mouth of bad teeth grimacing in anger.
Through the wavery panes of glass in the front doors, Dipper could see the big clock again, but it had changed.
Now the students weren't the Screaming Eagles any more, apparently.
An insanely ugly and leering face had replaced the bird. And now the team colors were orange and red.
Evidently the mascot now was the Mofo From Hell.
The doors opened of their own accord. The building seemed to pulsate like something breathing.
"Do we have to go inside?" Eloise whispered.
"I don't think we've got a choice," Dipper said. "But remember–none of it's real. I think if we can make it through this building, we'll come out on the far side."
"Into what?" Eloise asked.
He still held her hand. He gave it a reassuring squeeze. "God knows, but it's bound to be better than this."